forgefed VS AECforWebAssembly

If you don't mind me asking since you're here: will you be implementing ForgeFed in Gitness [0]? My sense is that federation is our best hope for breaking GitHub's network effects, and I'd love to see more projects like yours join the protocol.

[0] https://forgefed.org/

From the comments, Forgejo is also already working on implementing ForgeFed, an ActivityPub extension specifically designed for software forges [0]. Judging from the issue, it looks like they're well on their way [1].

I have to say, I'm not super into the idea of social media, but this is a use for federation I approve of wholeheartedly. The friction of having to create accounts on X forges (where X is the number of projects that self-host GitLab) is a huge moat for GitHub, and federation could solve that very handily and create an environment where FOSS projects can feasibly host their own code away from Microsoft's control without horribly inconveniencing everyone who wants to participate.

[0] https://forgefed.org/

[1] https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59

> I agree that e-mail is not perfect, but... how is GitHub better?

Please look at my comment again. I prefer email to locked in forges.

> Devs like new shiny toys, and e-mails are old technology

There is one aspect where such forges have an advantage over email - a better user experience. Aerc and the likes all good - but Github and others provide a good user experience over a tool that everyone uses - the web browser.

> we should have something better than e-mail in 2023

We really should have something better than email. I'm saying this as someone who operates a personal mail server and a bunch of desktop services for it. It's really hard to get the setup correct.

In that context, it's worth looking at forgefed (https://forgefed.org/). It's a protocol for federating forges like Gitea and Gitlab. It's built on top of ActivityPub - which behaves a bit like email (it has inboxes and outboxes for every user). From the spec, it seems like pull requests happen by sending patches to the destination forge.

> Nobody takes the time to try the e-mail workflow (even though it's really two git commands)

Email workflow seems simple. But there are two things that make it complicated:

1. The patches don't specify the commits they apply to. It's simply assumed that they apply to the head of the main branch. The commits have to be carefully rebased on the main branch before sending the patches. It could otherwise lead to conflicts and a lot of wasted time.

2. Each commit/patch is send as a single email. Developers usually make frequent commits when they develop. Such patches can be confusing and hellish to review. A sane patchset requires the developers to edit the commit history, usually using interactive rebases. Each commit should contain a single feature and shouldn't break the build.

I consider both the above to be good development practices and follow them even on my personal projects. However, this is an additional barrier to entry. In fact, this may be a bigger problem for many than setting up git for email.

Another interesting topic to look into is forge federation. Forgejo [0], the code forge on which Codeberg is based is one forge software that intends to federate their repositories between server instances over the network using ActivityPub protocol extensions such as ForgeFed [1] and F3 [2] specifications.

[0] https://forgejo.org

[1] https://forgefed.org

[2] https://lab.forgefriends.org/friendlyforgeformat

> If you want to look into people who disagree with you: https://forgefed.org/

Great! I have not yet made source maps for my programming language that compiles to WebAssembly, and I probably never will.

Up until today, my AEC-to-WebAssembly was, if somebody tried to use two structures of different types as the second and the third operand to the ?: (ternary conditional) operator, as in this example: ``` Structure First Consists Of Nothing; EndStructure

Well, I have written the first compiler for my programming language, targetting x86, in IE6-compatible JavaScript, and the second compiler, targetting WebAssembly, has been written in C++11. I think that, to choose a language to write a compiler in, you need to look at at least two things:

You can see the releases v2.5.3 and v2.5.2 of AECforWebAssembly on GitHub. They are produced with the same version of GCC, the only difference (as far as I know) is that v2.5.2 was produced directly on Debian, whereas v2.5.3 was cross-compiled from Windows to Linux using Docker.

That could be true. I host my AEC-to-WebAssembly compiler on GitHub, GitLab and SourceForge, and it's only on GitHub that it has 21 stars and 2 forks. On GitLab and SourceForge, it has zero of both.

Well, the main compiler for my programming language is targetting the JavaScript Virtual Machine by outputting WebAssembly. I think it's even better than targetting Java Virtual Machine, because, for one thing, your executables can run in any modern browser if you output WebAssembly. If you target Java Virtual Machine, the users need to actually download your app. Furthermore, there is an official assembler for WebAssembly called WebAssembly Binary Toolkit (WABT), so your compiler can output assembly and not have to deal with binary files. There is nothing equivalent to that for Java Virtual Machine.